With much of the hullabaloo over SaaS targeting small businesses, it was interesting to read a viewpoint in BusinessWeek this week, written by small business owner Gene Marks, in which Marks named SaaS and several Web 2.0 technologies as being in the "top 10 tech trends to ignore."
In his opinion piece, Marks makes the case that most small business owners will be leery of SaaS and not too trustworthy of the Internet always being reliable -- valid points that some of us probably tend to forget when working from buildings with always-on high speed DSL connections.
Marks also names virtualization, social networking sites, the Microsoft-Yahoo deal, and virtual worlds as being either pointless or not yet developed enough for small business owners to care. He points out (correctly, I think) that sites like FaceBook and MySpace don't really have built-in audiences for products and that virtual worlds are pure nonsense.
I thought Marks illustrated pretty well how sometimes marketers may end up being a little far removed from their audiences. Small businesses may not have dedicated IT departments and resources to play around with these new technologies.
What do you think? Does Marks have a point? Post below.
Gene is partly right. On their own, small business owners won't be able to dive into the whole Web 2.0 thing. It is like a thick forest without any hint of direction.
However, with the right professionals behind them (Internet marketers, web application developers, etc), they might as well build something to get into the whole Web 2.0 field and get something from it.
For a flower shop, for example, an app to find the closest flower shop with the best pricing of the selected flower type might be in order, no matter if it just hosted on the site or in Facebook or both. In fact, it'll be pretty easy to do with Google Maps API and other shopping comparison engines: it just requires some thought to:
- know what the online audience wants
- how to give it to it in the easiest way to absorb
That's what professionals/specialists do and that's why and how SMBs can get into the high gear and way ahead of their competition.
It is not just web apps that they are missing, they are missing the whole approach to content creation and marketing. But that's a whole another story.